Saturday, March 15, 2014

The Oriental Institute Coffin Texts Publication Project

The Oriental Institute Coffin Texts Publication Project

With the appearance of this volume, the Oriental Institute marks the true completion of the Egyptian Coffin Texts Project,
an international cooperative program begun by James Henry Breasted and Alan H. Gardiner in 1922 and edited by Adriaan De Buck from 1935 until his death in 1959. When published in 1961, volume 7, De Buck’s final volume, was announced as “the
last volume of the autographed Coffin Texts in the contemplated Project” (p. vii), although the Oriental Institute had never
produced the autographed edition of Pyramid Texts within the Coffin Text corpus that had been explicitly promised in the
introduction to volume 1. Assumed to comprise a “distinct” and “foreign body” within the Coffin Texts, these long-lived spells
were “reserved for later” (p. xi). After a lapse of forty years, a formally renewed Coffin Texts Project was authorized by the
director in 2001, with the goal of completing the Oriental Institute’s outstanding commitments. The translation volume once
envisioned and entrusted to Tjalling Bruinsma had been rendered unnecessary by the publications of Raymond O. Faulkner
in 1969 (Pyramid Texts) and 1973 –1978 (Coffin Texts), which serve to engage scholars and laymen alike. Glossaries,
bibliographies, symposia, and detailed textual studies appeared, but the critical edition of middle Kingdom Pyramid Texts
remained unaccomplished. by careful examination of the Oriental Institute’s original collation sheets and unpublished sources
from Lisht, James P. Allen, after years of concentrated study, has now fulfilled the task admirably. It is hoped that the new
edition stimulates discussion not only of the longevity of the Pyramid Texts, but of the nature of the Coffin Texts themselves.
While breasted insisted that the Pyramid Texts were “sharply distinguished” from the Coffin Texts, the frequent appearance
of “Pyramid Texts” on coffins (among the narrowly defined “Coffin Texts”) leaves this opinion open to question. ironically,
the one coffin acquired in Chicago by Breasted for study by the Coffin Texts Project (OIM 12072) contained only “Pyramid
Texts” and was therefore excluded from the initial seven volumes. Now at last these Middle Kingdom texts on a coffin can be
examined among the “Coffin Texts.”

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.